The immediate past Head of the Civil Service of the Federation, Professor Oladapo Afolabi, spoke on his stewardship in an interview with select journalists in Abuja, last week. Clement Idoko brings excerpts.W hat are the issuesyou met on the groundand how were you able to tackle them' Basically, when I came in, we met the challenge of capacity building. We had capacity deficit, due to the fact that civil servants have not been properly trained over the years. So, thatwas a major issue and, of course, we met the issue of lethargy; the issue of civil servants being really not too excited about the job because of the general perception. We also met the issue of inadequacy of real take home pay of the civil servants. We also met at the time, pensioners still loitering around and hanging around here, some of them dying in the process of wanting to get pay. Of course, we also met the issue civil servants not feeling really proud of themselves because of where they found themselves in. In a general sense, there was the welfare deficit. These are the things that I inherited.And how were you able to tackle them' Well, really, we tackled them, not me alone. I will say, we had a team that was very good. On the issue of capacity, we had estimated that to be able to bring all the civil servants from Grade Levels 8-17 to be adequately trained, annually would require 40 billion. And we felt that these days that we want to have a balanced budget of lower recurrent and capital and also not to have a deficit budget; we felt that we could not continue to demand more and more money for recurrent issues. So, we leveraged on Information and Communication Technology (ICT).Today, we have compulsory courses for civil servants from Levels 8-17 in areas of management, project management; in the area of French, use of English, communication, in ICT itself, in rules and regulation and in all the administrative skills that you require to manage; we have all that now. We hope that in the future, Mr President will launch it himself. But right now, we have over 13, 000 civil servants who have been enrolled and have started getting trained. We chose French language because all our neighbours are French-speaking countries and we want all civil servants to be able to speak French. Within a short time, you will see that all our civil servants will be able to communicate and write in French, because without it, you cannot move to the next level.Also, because of what we noticed as very poor use of English and since English is the official language, we also added English there for people to learn how to speak and how to write it properly. We also had the Code of Ethics and the Rules which we run ourselves. We have a recent publication of the Code of Ethics in booklet form, which we are distributing to all civil servants. It is about how you carry yourself, how to conduct yourself; how to speak to people; how to present yourself to the public, not only to change the perception by doing real things but it is also for you to live up to standard. That is one way of trying to face capacity deficit.The other way we are trying to face capacity deficit is through staff exchange, which we launched few days ago. We expect that if you go out there to the private sector, you acquire skills that you can bring back and also for the private sector to come in, we have things to offer here for them also to know.In a general sense, we are also going beyond the civil service. We are going to the totality of Nigeria because it is a sum total of Nigeria that we are entrusted in, to move Nigeria as nation to the next level. What we have also done on capacity building is to affiliate our management development institutions with overseas countries. For example, Administrative Staff College of Nigeria (ASCON) is in linkage programme with an overseas university. We are also in linkage programme with the Commonwealth Secretariat. All their programmes are there for us.This year in January, we brought Kennedy School of Government, which normally is not done, out of Harvard, to come here and interact with our Permanent Secretaries and Heads of Service of the states, three times. We also intended that they will be going there by the end of the year all Permanent Secretaries and state Heads of Service to Harvard, again to acquire capacity. So, we are really on board. We have started improving in capacity building. As I have said, a journey of a thousand miles starts with one step.We have started and we hope that, over the years, this will be sustained and improved upon.You spoke so much on staff training, how do you measure their optimal performance after training'In any system, if you do not have a benchmark, what is expected of you, anything you do is okay. But now we are beginning to set targets. We have introduced performance management system and the instrument is ready. This was benchmarked with countries like Malaysia, Singapore, South Africa, and the UK, using our consultant, KPMG, to develop an instrument.For it to be used, we really require that all stakeholders must be on board. We were to get to the next stage of getting the ministers to buy in and then we can launch it and move on. Why this is important is that civil servants every year will know what they need to do and what they need to deliver and what we use to benchmark them. It is no longer 'stay there one year'; now, you will know that in one year, this is what I'm supposed to deliver. And if you don't do that you, yourself, will know that you are not working optimally.On the issue of welfare, about the time I was coming in, we had about 50 per cent increase in salary. I was part of the negotiation and that tremendously has improved the take home package of the civil servants. We have also launched affordable housing scheme for civil servants in prime areas; not that you start scratching your head when they say where do you live as a civil servant. But now, in a prime area, you can proudly tell anybody. We want to restore the integrity of the civil servants to, once again, improve on their productivity by wanting to associate with the office which they hold.On the pension, what we met was that the system that we had running had some bottlenecks. We sat with the sub-chairman again and developed another software, such that, today, if we have any complaint on pension, within 48 hours it is resolved.But we still have couples of complaints from pensioners not being paid for some months, and what about the taskforce team you set up to look at the pension issues' Well, I tell you that I inherited the Taskforce, which I did not disband. But I will tell you that since I came on board, we have been able to achieve payment within 48 hours of complaint. When you look around, you will not find any pensioner hanging around anywhere. That is a tremendous achievement and in terms of delayed payment, it is not happening anywhere, except for 48 hours. But if you have anybody complaining, he has never been captured on the biometrics. Once you are captured, you receive your payment within 48 hours. And now, there is an exercise going, which is the revalidation of the verification exercise. That is going to be completed in the next 21 days or there about and that is to ensure that we have a clean pension database and from there we will get these pensioners to be happy anywhere they are. Of course, we don't have a perfect system but I can tell you, we have improved on pension.One of your laudable projects is definitely this e-learning pro-gramme, how does it operate' Well, as it is now, if you go to all the MDAs, they have one of the ICT centres, where they train. And so we expect that all civil servants should be ICT-compliant; anybody who is not is an aberration. As for the e-learning, you are asking how it is running. What we have, typically, is that we have for every grade level a set of mandatory training. I broke down the administrative component to you. We also have the professional component. So, if you are an engineer, for example in Ministry of Works, there are a number of courses that you must take. between Level 8 and 17. If you are in the Ministry of Environment, there are number of courses you must take. If you are in Police Affairs, there are number of courses you must take and so on and so forth, like that for every profession. Actually, we have now 15, 000 courses available. We have 15, 000 courses uploaded, which right now, you can access. Of course, if you are not a Civil Servant you cannot upload them.
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